Extracting data from AliBaba
Extracting data from e-commerce portals like Alibaba can open up a host of opportunities for competitors, market research firms and price comparison websites.
Being one of the leading e-commerce portals out there, the product catalog of the site is enormous and open to anyone looking to extract the data. However, getting hold of the data available on AliBaba might turn out to be a challenge if you lack the right resources and manpower required to carry out web scraping. Outsourcing your AliBaba data requirement to a dedicated data provider like PromptCloud will relieve you of the complexities in web crawling.
Key benefits of our web crawling solution
PromptCloud offers fully customizable web data extraction solution that’s scalable enough to cater to the data requirements of large enterprises. Quality and consistency are of prime importance as far as web crawling is concerned. Although there are DIY tools and the option of scraping via in-house resources, there are many key differentiators that set us apart in the big data space. Here are some:
Fully customizable: Not every website is made alike and there’s just no one size fits all tool to crawl websites. This is why we have built an infrastructure that is flexible and customizable according to our clients’ varied requirements. This level of customization makes it possible to crawl sites that use complex and dynamic coding practices.
Multiple data delivery options: We understand that the consumption of data is done differently across organizations. This is why we deliver the data in multiple popular formats like JSON, CSV and XML via REST API The data can also be delivered to Dropbox, Box, Amazon S3 or your own FTP server. With such a host of delivery options to choose from, consuming the data should be a cakewalk.
Fully managed solution: The biggest challenge with web crawling is the maintenance of the crawler setup. Since websites keep getting updated on a constant basis, there should be a prompt monitoring system in place to look out for the site changes that can affect the data retrieval. We handle this with an automated monitoring system that sends out alerts upon detection of site changes. The crawler setup is promptly modified to ensure continued functioning of the extraction task. Since we take end-to-end responsibility of the web crawling process, you get the data you need without any interruptions.
High quality structured data: The quality of the delivered data should be one of the biggest priorities when it comes to web data extraction. This is because the data quality can make or break your data project. At PromptCloud, we process the data using refining mechanisms like deduplication, noise cleansing and structuring. The output is clean, structured data of top notch quality.
What you can do with data extracted from AliBaba
Promptcloud is one of the pioneers in web crawling and data as a service model. The fully managed nature of our solution helps data scientists focus on their core projects rather than try and master web scraping, which is a niche and technically challenging process. Since the solution is customizable from end to end, it can easily handle complicated and dynamic websites that aren’t crawl-friendly. We offer data in different structured formats like CSV, XML and JSON via various mediums such as Amazon S3, Dropbox, PromptCloud API or your own FTP server. If you are looking to get web data for a data science requirement, you can get in touch with us.
Web data has the potential to help businesses fill the intelligence gap in the organization. Here are some things you can do with the data extracted from AliBaba.
Fuel your price comparison engine: Price comparison engines need data to compare and display it to the users and AliBaba being one of the most popular ecommerce destinations, it makes sense to include AliBaba in your price comparison portal.
Cataloging: If you are an Ecommerce website, it goes without saying how important cataloging is to your business. An updated and comprehensive product catalog is crucial for dominating the ecommerce market. You can easily use web crawling to fetch data from the catalogs of your competitors which in turn helps you identify new categories and products that should be included in your ecommerce portal.
Analyses: If you are a market research firm or a manufacturer trying to gain insights from the consumer’s side, extracting reviews and ratings data from Alibaba can help you. Since these reviews are user generated content, you get a clear picture about how consumers are perceiving a particular brand or product. This information can be used in improving the existing products and coming up with new ones to cater to a rising demand.
Getting started with Data Crawling
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